Innovation at Massey

Now more than ever, innovation has to be the single most important driving force in education as universities embrace change and engage with today's formidable challenges.

The ultimate challenge for a university is to translate, distribute and exploit the new knowledge its academics continually create. Massey staff and students embrace the “innovation cycle”—creating new ideas, then partnering with entrepreneurs and stakeholders in industry and government to transform these ideas into solutions.

At Massey we value the innovative impulse of the musician and the microbiologist equally. As an outward-looking university, we are forming these partnerships and collaborations with key groups, whether they are communities, councils, governments, iwi, academic institutions or businesses.

Innovation takes many shapes at Massey, from an iPad app for interacting with ancient Greek vases to an online learning environment that gives distance learning students a similar experience to those studying on-campus. New technologies give better learning outcomes for students, and creative approaches to learning trains students to arrive at innovative solutions through problem-solving. When students have different kinds of learning experiences, using different senses, the whole quality of the learning experience is enhanced, and the quality of their learning improves.

New Zealand doesn't always have every skill or every expert that it might require, and lack of funding often represents another obstacle to research. Overcoming these hurdles is another area where innovative approaches are necessary. Even something as simple as gathering data and information in a cost-effective way can lead to less costly research investigations, increasing both the quality and quantity of research the University can produce.

When working between disciplines, we must innovate to create useful tools and come at problems with an appreciation for their complexity. Innovation is to science what creativity is to art, and all science worthy of the name is innovative.

No discipline, institution, or society can afford to rest easy when it comes to innovation; we must constantly push forward to find new and better solutions to both existing problems and issues we may face in the future.

These three videos featuring Massey staff go into further detail about what innovation means at Massey, and the areas of interest pages go even deeper in describing the great strides Massey has made in shaping the future.

Page authorised by Web Content Manager
Last updated on Tuesday 16 August 2016